Summary: This is the first of a pair of seminars which take the focus of the module back to the arena we examined closely in Term 1: the religious life and culture of the parishes. We will consider the ways in which Henrician religious reforms impacted on local parish life, and how local communities reacted.

Seminar and essay questions:

a) Did the Henrician Reformation leave local religious cultures substantially intact?

b) How deeply divided did local communities become by 1547?

 

R Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, ch 3

E Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, chs 11-12 (a, b)

--------, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation & Rebellion in an English Village (2001), ch 5

P. Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (2017), chs 8-9

C Haigh, English Reformations, ch 9 (a)

M Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, pp 222-46

----------, Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion 1350-1600, ch 9; also in P Marshall ed., The Impact of the English Reformation (1997)

E H Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (2003), ch 6 (b)

P Marshall, ‘The Rood of Boxley, the Blood of Hailes, and the Defence of the Henrician Church’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 46 (1995) -on government propaganda against superstition.

-----------, ‘Forgery and Miracles in the Reign of Henry VIII’, Past and Present, 178 (2003) – develops the argument more fully. Also in Marshall, Religious Identities in the Reign of Henry VIII.

----------, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (2002), ch 2

R Whiting, ‘Local Responses to the Henrician Reformation’, in D MacCulloch ed., The Reign of Henry VIII (1995). Expanded version as Local Responses to the English Reformation (1998)

-------------, ‘“Abominable Idols”: Images and Image-breaking under Henry VIII’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, (1982) (a)

------------, The Blind Devotion of the People, chs 4, 5 (relevant sections)

------------, ‘“For the health of my soul”: prayers for the dead in the Tudor Southwest’, Southern History (1983) and in P Marshall ed., The Impact of the English Reformation

------------, The Reformation of the English Parish Church (2010)